prepare to go aah…
September 28th, 2008 - Posted in sheep - by Sarah|
We now have a set of twin lambs at the Croft that are 5 days old today. On the day that they were born one was noticeably smaller and weaker than the other (lying down wearing a woolover in the photo below). We decided to take the weaker one away and bottle feed it to give them both the best chance of survival, especially as their mum, Hat, is only one year old herself.
So our last few days have revolved around bottle feeding 6 times a day with Colostrum and milk replacer and both lambs are doing well. They are quite different to look at though both show signs of Mittens’ parentage (fine Gotland faces with handlebar ears) so they are our first Gotland-English Leicester crosses. Neither have really got names yet as we wanted to be confident that they would survive before getting our hopes set on Cajun Lamb Salad again.
The one that we’re feeding has dark hair and skin under the white rosebud curls and a couple of black spots about the size of a golf ball – one on the back of its neck and one on a leg. It also has brown and tan patches in the downy wool on its legs.
The other is pink and white with no dark patches at all. It is doing fine with Hat despite us having heavy rain yesterday followed by a cold night.
We will continue to post more cute photos as we take them over the next few weeks.
Also on the subject of sheep, we have started shearing again and tackled Mittens and Socks first. We knew that we should have really done them sooner but this winter has been so wet that it’s been hard to find a time when their fleeces would have dried out. A few weeks ago they looked like this…
… and now they look a bit thinner. Mittens is still quite dark grey,
while Socks is silvery white in places.
Consent to build (at last)
September 16th, 2008 - Posted in eco-building - by Sarah|
Nine months and ten days ago we submitted the building consent application for our house to Grey District council and today we finally got the phone call to go and collect it. Now, in addition to building the house we just have the fight to get our fees refunded ahead of us.
Councils are supposed to respond to all applications within 20 working days of submission either to give consent or make a request for additional information. Our first request for additional information took 28 weeks, many visits and phone calls to the council and a formal letter of complaint. Until then we hadn’t had so much as an acknowledgement from them so didn’t even have a reference number to put on the complaint! In the 17 weeks since then we have been blatantly lied to, been told that errors were made during the consent for the garage and had to escalate delays once again in order to actually make any progress. At the same time materials costs have gone up across the board and we have had to spend a winter without a house to live in.
The documentation, when we collected it this morning, had been transformed from a neat, bound and usable document into an untidy stack of pages stapled together randomly. Someone in the council office has had to spend half a day putting their official stamp on each page individually instead of just the cover sheet.
It’s no wonder that so many people go for standardised house plans – while all this has been going on some friends have had their house consented and built.
Still, we are very relieved to have ended up making no major compromises – untreated timber, earth floor, lime plaster, timber windows and a composting loo. We’ll do a longer post here soon on the house design and layout.
